In 1989, the summer before the Berlin Wall collapsed, a pregnant, young American art historian, is drawn back to Berlin, seeking the truth about the disappearance of her husband. There, she meets an exiled East German artist whose tormented life and stories of the Greek mystics make him both forbidding and irresistible. In this novel of conflicting allegiances played out between Cold War Berlin and the stark beauty of the Cycladic islands, tourists, natives, and refugees circle one another warily, their fates hanging on the question of which trusts if any, will remain inviolate.